I’ve had a couple random questions floating around in my head for a couple days!
Have you ever had an actor or director interpret your characters incorrectly?
Was it better/worse?
Is that even a thing that happens?
I remember seeing a youtube video about how playing characters in particular ways can change an audience’s attitude towards that character. (Watched it ages ago but think about it all the time). I think it was a video of Patrick Stewart talking about portraying Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.
Have you ever had an entire work interpreted incorrectly?
Anywho, I hope things are going well!
This might be a long and sprawling answer, so hang on tight!
There is a difference between writing and wrighting, and I think knowing that difference will clarify the way I answer this. The wright in playwright means the same as the wright in shipwright or cartwright or wainwright. A playwright constructs or builds a play.
Structure is the most crucial element in the success of a play because a good play works in so many dimensions. It should make a room full of strangers feel the same thing at the same time, in the correct order. A playwright builds an experience, and characters are one tool in the toolbox.
With that in mind, that's where writers and wrighters diverge, and where I piss a lot of people off.
Unlike in a novel or a story, every single thing in a playscript is intentional. While I am lucky and get to be involved in a lot of development and productions, ideally, one day, the script will land in the hands of a director who I don't know, and I'll never meet them or speak to them.
With that in mind, my playscript needs to serve as the entire instruction manual for how to build this play. It needs to tell that director, who will never speak to me, every single thing they NEED to know to do the story justice... and it needs to accomplish that without restricting them because directors, too, are artists.
We talk a lot about the plasticity of the page. How can we use things like font, spacing, and stage directions to make the experience of the play vibrant in a director's mind they read?
But remember! The playscript is also an instruction manual for the actors. And actors are also artists. If the script doesn't provide the information they need to make the "right" choice about a character, they're going to make something up. And if I'm not there to advocate for my characters, that fabulation becomes the truth.
That brings me back to "characters are tools."
Writers of prose love to 'think about the character' and 'rotate the character' and 'come up with elaborate backstories for the character while falling asleep,' etc. A lot of the time, these thoughts make it into the text of their writing.
While playwrights CAN do all that, it matters a LOT less. Remember, we're writing instructions. The most important thing to a playwright is what the character wants and what they do in their attempt to get it.
Characters in plays aren't people. They shouldn't exist in multiple dimensions. They exist only to have and pursue an objective. Period. The only thing about them that matters is what they actively do and say on the page (and, eventually, the stage). Nobody but actors care about their childhood or hopes and dreams if they aren't relevant to the immediate action of the play. Every single action and word serves the story. If it doesn't, the character is a flawed tool, and it's time to murder the shit out of some darlings.
A play is always taking place NOW. It needs to be urgent. Every word, space, punctuation mark, line break, random capitalization, and italicized word needs to serve a purpose, and the purpose is to "help other artists tell THIS story as clearly as possible."
A LOT of work goes into ensuring that happens.
The bottom line: if a play makes it to the stage and an actor or a director has STILL interpreted characters or a story incorrectly, the playwright has failed.
It actually happens a lot! People often say, "monologues are the easiest thing to write and the hardest thing to justify." Nine times out of ten, they just stop the action.
Also, playwrights have a tendency to "wind up." The most common note playwrights get from dramaturgs is "The play starts on page 3." With the play I'm working on, my dramaturg and I actually decided, "The play starts on page 34." AND WE WERE CORRECT!
Luckily, works are never finished, only abandoned. The work of new play development is to find where the ambiguities and darlings are and correct or kill them before the script makes it into the hands of another director.
The job of the playwright is to ensure the director cannot fail.
With all that said, I do pursue development for my work (a lot of new work playwrights either don't or don't have the opportunity, as development requires people, which costs money, which means there is gatekeeping involved, and opportunities are incredibly competitive). Thus, I have been in a lot of spaces where the goal is to find where I've failed and correct it... so, yes, I do have stories xD
❥ I once had a co-world premiere of a brand new one-act play - one production in Chicago, which I wasn't involved in at all, and one production in NYC, in which I was marginally involved. One-acts typically go through a less rigorous development process. I saw the Chicago production first. For me, the play didn't work. The director had chosen to ignore some stage directions, which meant it lost some moments of comedy and the beats and pacing I intended just didn't happen. The result was a production that felt kind of mediocre. I had a stone in my stomach before attending the NYC production because I had convinced myself that the play didn't work. However, THAT director "followed the instructions," and by the end of the piece, the entire theatre was sobbing in tandem. It got a standing ovation. It was actually a good lesson for me and for directors out there. SOMETIMES FIDELITY MATTERS. If you don't respect a playwright enough to stick to what's on the page, you shouldn't be producing new work.
❥ This one's just a funny story. We once started rehearsals for a developmental process before the director (who was also serving as dramaturg) had a chance to prepare for tablework. She'd dismissed the actors for the night, and everyone was saying their goodbyes. Just as one of the actors was walking out the door, the director stood up and yelled across the room, "WAIT! DID YOU KNOW YOU HAVE PTSD?" The entire room went silent. Everyone was like ??? The director, of course, was talking about the character, not the actor, but since we'd all moved on from the play, that was NOT clear! LOL! Needless to say, the director came prepared with a GORGEOUS dramaturgical presentation for the next rehearsal, and we were able to talk through that detail in depth. xD
❥ While workshopping my horny whale play, I was in with the intimacy coordinator while the director was working on other scenes. Somehow, she'd misinterpreted the given circumstances of a scene BADLY. Basically, the character's ENTIRE objective from page one is "Despite strong mutual attraction, I will not have sex with this man until he does what I want."
Even though the man had NOT done what the character wanted, the director decided that the scene was.... post-coital???? Frankly, I am still baffled about how she got there, and I still struggle to believe it was entirely my fault. Even so, I knew I had to director-proof the scene for the future.
Thus, we now have this stage direction that will forever make me laugh:
ONLY A DEBRIEF. I REPEAT. THEY DID NOT FUCK. FUCKING DID NOT HAPPEN.
Anyway, no subsequent directors have had that problem lmao
❥ This one addresses your comment about an audience's interpretation of a character. This is the same play as above. Because the piece was a commission, I knew which theatre would be producing the first workshop - which meant I had some idea about which actors I'd have available. I ended up writing a role with a specific actor in mind, and I asked the theatre if we could hire her for the workshop.
Throughout rehearsals, she was everything I dreamed about and more, and I was ELATED. However, according to the post-workshop comment cards, a lot of people found the character very annoying... and while the character IS a little annoying by design, I didn't think it was bad enough that multiple people would mention it as a flaw in the piece?!?!
I was in love with the character, so I brought it to another workshop. Someone else cast the show, a different actor played that part (differently but with fidelity), and one of my development questions was, "Is this character annoying?"
Nobody thought she was.
So, I went back to the original theatre, and they were like, "No, it was 100% the actor, but you loved her so much, we didn't say want to anything."
Anyway, I think that's why they say 90% of directing is good casting. Good thing I'm not a director xD (I still love that actor and would cast her again in a heartbeat... but that might be because I think women should be allowed to be annoying if they want.)
❥ All that to say, actors bring SO MUCH to new work development processes. Actors are a character's first advocate. They see the entire story through their characters' eyes and provide amazing insight. Actors ask the best questions and ensure they have what they need to meet their character's objective, no matter how small their role is.
Sometimes, the way an actor delivers a line informs the script - I add in a beat that just WORKS, italicize something, or canonize the way an actor misspoke if it was more effective. Sometimes they improv and it's SO FUNNY I can no longer imagine a scene without it. And that's part of the process! We put plays on their feet in their infancy to FIND these nuances that give scripts life!
❥ However, I have no sympathy for the actor who continuously read the line "I am a child of God" as "I am the child of God." Taught me a lot about the character, though xD
